First All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Deputies

MAY 4–28 (MAY 17–JUNE 10), 1917

2

Speech on the Agrarian Question
May 22 (June 4), 1917

Comrades, the resolution that I am privileged to present to you
in the name of the Social-Democratic group of the Peasants’
Soviet has been printed and distributed to the delegates. If any
delegates have not received it we shall have more copies printed
tomorrow for distribution to all who wish to have them.

In a short report I can, of course, deal only with the main,
basic questions, those that are of greatest interest to the
peasantry and the working class. To those interested in the
question in greater detail, I can recommend the resolution of our Party, the
Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), published
as a Supplement to Soldatskaya Pravda No. 13,
and repeatedly dealt with in our newspaper
Pravda.[1]
At
the moment I shall have to confine myself to elucidating the
more important points of my resolution and of our Party
programme on the agrarian question that are most controversial
or give rise to misunderstanding. One of the first of these
debatable points is that touched upon yesterday or the day
before in the Chief
Land
Committee[3] at the session you have probably heard about
or read about in the newspapers of yesterday or the day
before. That session of the Chief Land Committee was attended by
a representative of our Party, Comrade Smilga, a colleague of
mine on
the Central Committee. He proposed to the session that
the Chief Land Committee should express itself in favour of the
immediate organised seizure by the peasants of the landed
estates, but a number of violent objections were raised to
Comrade Smilga’s proposal. (Voice: “Here, too.”) I am
now told that a number of comrades here will also speak against
that proposal. All the more reason for my clarifying that point
in our programme, because I believe that most of the objections
against our programme are based on a misunderstanding or
misrepresentation of our views.

What do all our Party resolutions, all the articles in our
newspaper Pravda say? We say that all the land, without
exception, must become the property of the whole nation. We have
come to this conclusion after having studied, in particular, the
peasant movement of 1905 and the statements made by peasant
deputies to the First and Second Dumas, where many peasant
deputies from all over Russia were able to speak with
relative—relative, of course—freedom.

All the land must be the property of the whole nation. From this
it follows that in advocating the immediate transfer, without
payment, of the landed estates to the local peasants we do not
by any means advocate the seizure of those estates as private
property, we do not by any means advocate the division of those
estates. We believe the land should be taken by the local
peasantry for one sowing in accordance with a decision adopted
by the majority of local peasant deputies. We do not by any
means advocate the transfer of this land as private property to
those peasants who are now taking it for one sowing. All
objections of this kind to our proposal that I am constantly
hearing and reading in the columns of the capitalist newspapers
are based on a sheer misinterpretation of our views. Since we
have said—and I repeat: we have said that in all our
resolutions—that the land must be the property of the whole
nation and must be taken over by it without payment—it is
obvious that arrangements for the final disposal of the land,
the final establishment of land regulations must be made only by
a central state power, that is, by a Constituent Assembly or an
All-Russia Council of Soviets, should the masses of peas ants
and workers establish such state power as a Council
of
Soviets. On this score there are no differences of opinion.

The
differences begin after this, when we are told: “If
that is so, then any immediate uncompensated transfer of the
landed estates to the peasantry would be an unauthorised act.”
That is the view that was expressed most exactly, most
authoritatively and most weightily by Minister of Agriculture
Shingaryov in his well-known telegram; we consider this view to
be fallacious, unfair, most prejudicial to the peasantry,
prejudicial to the farmers, and the least likely to ensure the
country a supply of grain. Allow me to read that telegram to
show you what we mostly object to.

“An independent solution of the land question in the absence of
a general state law is inadmissible. Arbitrary action will lead
to a national calamity ... the lawful solution of the land
question is the business of the Constituent Assembly. At the
present time agricultural conciliation chambers have been set up
by the tillers of the land and the landowners in each local area
under the rural supply committees.”

This is the chief passage from the government’s statement on
this question. If you acquaint yourselves with the resolution of
the Chief Land Committee on this question adopted yesterday or
the day before, and the resolution adopted, also the other day,
at a private meeting of Duma deputies, you will see that the two
resolutions proceed from the same viewpoint. The peasants who
want land handed over immediately to the peasants without
payment and distributed by local peasant committees are accused
of unauthorised acts on the assumption that only a voluntary
agreement between peasants and landowners, between the tillers
and the owners of the land, would be in accordance with the
needs and interests of the state. That is what we deny, that is
what we dispute.

The usual objections are that the land in Russia is distributed
very unevenly, both between individual small units such as
villages and volosts and between the bigger units such as gubernias
and regions. It is said that if the local population were to
take over the land by a majority decision against the will of
the landowners and without payment at that, the unevenness would
remain and there would even be a danger of it becoming
perpetuated. We say in reply that this argument
is based on a
misunderstanding. The uneven distribution will remain in any
case until the Constituent Assembly or some other central state
power finally establishes a new system. Until such a system is
established the uneven distribution will remain whether the
question is settled in the peas ant’s or in the landowner’s way,
whether in our way, with the immediate transfer of the land to
the peasants, or in the way of the landowners, who are prepared
to lease their land out at a high rent provided the tenant
farmer and the landowner each retains his own rights. This
objection is obviously incorrect and unjust. We say that a
central state power must be established as quickly as possible,
one that not only relies on the will and the decision of the
peas ant majority, but also directly expresses the opinion of
that majority. There are no differences on this score. When we
hear objections to the Bolsheviks, attacks levelled against us
in the capitalist newspapers accusing us of being anarchists, we
repudiate such accusations most emphatically and regard them as
an attempt to spread malicious lies and slander.

Anarchists are those who deny the need for a state power,
whereas we say that a state power is absolutely necessary, not
only for Russia today but for any state, even one that goes over
directly to socialism. Without doubt the firmest possible
authority is necessary. All we want is for that power to be
wholly and exclusively in the hands of the majority of workers’,
soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies. That is where we differ from
other parties. By no means do we deny the need for a firm state
power; we only say that all landed estates must pass into the
hands of the peasants without payment, in accordance with a
decision of the local peasant committee adopted by the majority,
and on the condition that no damage is done to property. This is
stated most explicitly in our resolution. We emphatically reject
any allegation that our view implies an arbitrary act.

In our opinion, on the contrary, if the landowners keep back the
land for their own use or charge money for it, that is an
arbitrary act, but if the majority of peasants say that the
landed estates must not remain in the hands of their owners, and
that the peasantry has known nothing but oppression by those
landowners for decades, for centuries, that is not
arbitrary,
that is the restitution of justice, and we cannot put
off that restitution. If the land is transferred to the peas
ants immediately the unevenness among the regions cannot be
eliminated, that is indisputable; but nobody can eliminate that
unevenness until the Constituent Assembly meets. If you were to
ask Shingaryov today—that same Shingaryov who raises
objections to us and reviles the champions of our views in
official papers for “arbitrary action”—if you were to ask
him what he proposes to do about that unevenness, he would be
unable to answer you. He does not and cannot propose
anything.

He speaks about “voluntary agreement between peasants and
landowners”. What does that mean? I will cite two basic figures
on landownership in European Russia. These figures show that at
one end of the Russian village there are the most wealthy
landowners, among them the Romanovs, the richest and the worst
of landowners, and at the other end are the extremely poor
peasants. I am citing two figures to show you the significance
of the sermon preached by Shingaryov and all landowners and
capitalists. These are the two figures: if we take the richest
landowners of European Russia, we shall see that the biggest of
them, numbering less than 30,000, own about 70,000,000 dessiatines
of land. That works out at over 2,000 dessiatines each. If you
take the upper crust of rich Russian landowners, irrespective of
what social estate they belong to (most of them are nobles, but
there are other landowners as well), you find that there are
30,000 of them and they own 70,000,000 dessiatines! And if you
take the poor peasants according to the same 1905 Census, which
is the latest available information gathered uniformly
throughout Russia—information, which, like all statistics
gathered in tsarist times by tsarist civil servants, is none too
trustworthy, although it does give some approximation of the
truth, some data can be compared—if you take the poor
peasantry you get 10,000,000 households owning from 70,000,000
to 75,000,000 dessiatines of land. This means that one person
has over 2,000 dessiatines and the other seven and a half
dessiatines per household! And they say the peasants are guilty
of arbitrary acts if they do not enter into a voluntary
agreement. What is meant by “voluntary agreement”? It means that
the landowners may perhaps let
you have land for a good rent but
will not give it up to any body without payment. Is that just?
Of course it is not. Is that profitable to the peasant
population? Of course it is not. The form in which landed
property will ultimately be established is for the future
central state authority to decide, but at the present time the
landed estates must be immediately transferred to the peasantry
without compensation, provided the seizure is
organised. Minister Chernov, opposing my colleague Smilga in the
Chief Land Committee, said that the two words “organised
seizure” are a contradiction in terms; if it’s a seizure, then
it is unorganised, and if it’s organised, then it is not a
seizure. I do not think this criticism is correct. I think that
if the peasantry make a majority decision in any village or
volost, any uyezd or gubernia—in some gubernias, if not
all, the peasant congresses have set up local authorities
representing the interests and will of the majority, the will of
the population, i.e., of the majority of the tillers of the
soil—once these authorities are set up in the localities
the decision they make will be the decision of authorities
recognised by the peas ants. The local peasantry are certain to
respect these authorities, for there is no doubt that these
freely elected authorities will decide that the landed estates
must immediately pass into the hands of the peasants. Let the
peasant know that he is taking the estate of the landowner, and
if he pays anything, let him pay it into a local peasant fund,
and let him know that the money will go towards farm
improvements, paving and road building, etc. Let him know that
the land he is taking is not his land, nor is it
the land owner’s, but the common property of the
people, which the Constituent Assembly will, in the end, dispose
of. For this reason the landowners must have no right to the
land from the very beginning of the revolution, from the moment
the first land committee was set up, and no payment should be
required for it.

The basic difference between ourselves and our-opponents is in
our respective understanding of what order is and what law
is. Up to now law and order have been regarded as things that
suited the landowners and bureaucrats, but we maintain that law
and order are things that suit the majority of the
peasantry. Until there is an All-Russia Council of Soviets,
until there is a Constituent Assembly, local
authority—uyezd and gubernia committees—constitutes
the supreme law and order! We call it lawlessness when one
landowner, on the basis of ancient rights, demands a “voluntary”
agreement with three hundred peasant families who have an
average of seven and a half dessiatines of land each! We say:
“Let a decision be taken by the majority; we want the peasants
to obtain the landed estates now, without losing a single month,
a single week or even a single day.”

We are told: “If the peasants seize the land now, It is the
richer peasants who will get it, those who have animals,
implements, etc.; would this, therefore, not be dangerous from
the point of view of the poor peasants?” Comrades, I must dwell
on this argument, because our Party, in all our decisions,
programmes and appeals to the people, declares:
“We are the party of wage-workers and poor peasants; it is their
interests we are out to protect; it is through them, and through
them alone, through those classes, that mankind can escape the
horrors into which the capitalists’ war has plunged it.”

To objections like these, claiming that our decisions are
contrary to the interests of the poor peasants, we pay careful
attention and invite a most careful study of them because they
touch the very heart of the matter, the very root of the
problem. And the heart of the matter Is this: how can the
interests of the wage-workers, both urban and rural, and the
interests of the poor peasants be protected in the revolution,
in the transformation of the political system, that is now
taking place in Russia, how can and should their interests be
protected against those of the landowners or rich peasants who
are also capitalists? That, of course, is the crux of the
matter, the nub of the whole problem. But we are told that if we
advise the peasants to seize the land immediately, it is those
who have implements and animals who will mostly do the seizing
and the poor will be left out of the picture. And now I ask
you—will a voluntary agreement with the landowners
help?

You know very well that the landowners are not anxious to rent
out land to those peasants who have not got a kopek in their
pockets, but, on the contrary, resort to “voluntary” agreements
where they are promised substantial payment.
Up to now the landowners do not seem to have been giving their
land away for nothing—at least nobody in Russia ever
noticed it.

To speak of voluntary agreements with the landowners means
greatly increasing and consolidating the privileged,
preferential position and the advantages enjoyed by the rich
peasant, because the rich peasant can certainly pay the land
owner and every landowner regards him as a person who is good
for his money. The landowner knows that the rich peasant can pay
and that he can be sued for the money, so that the rich peasant
has more to gain by such “voluntary” deals with the landowners
than the poor peasant. If there is any possibility of helping
the poor peasant straight away, it is by a measure such as I
propose—the land must go to the peasants immediately and
without payment.

Landed estates always have been and will be a flagrant
injustice. The free tenure of that land by the peasants, if the
tenure is in accordance with the will of the majority, ’will not
be an arbitrary act but a restitution of justice. That is our
point of view, and that is why we consider the argument that the
poor peasantry would lose by it to be a great injustice. The
agreement is called “voluntary”—only Shingaryov could call
it that—when one landowner has 2,000 dessiatines and 300
peasants have an average of seven and a half per family. To call
such an agreement voluntary is sheer mockery of the
peasants. For the peasant it is not a voluntary agreement, but a
compulsory one, and will be such until every volost, gubernia or
uyezd peasant Soviet or the All-Russia Council of Soviets
declares that the landed estates are a gross injustice and that
they must be abolished without losing a single hour, a single
minute.

The land must be the property of the entire people, and must be
declared such by a central state power. Until that power is
established, the local authorities, I again repeat, should take
over the landed estates and should do so In an organised manner
according to the will of the majority. It. Is not true, as the
newspapers assert, that disorder reigns in Russia! It isn’t
true—there is greater order in the country side than ever
before, because majority decisions are being
made; there have
been scarcely any acts of violence against tile landowners;
unfair treatment of the landowners has occurred only in isolated
cases; they are insignificant and in Russia as a whole are not
more in number than those which formerly occurred.

Now I want to mention another argument that I have heard and had
occasion to deal with in our newspaper Pravda in
connection with the immediate transfer of the land to the
peasantry.[2]

The argument is
this: It we advise the peasants to take over the landed estates
immediately and without payment, this will cause discontent,
annoyance and anxiety and perhaps even indignation among the
soldiers at the front who may say, “If the peasants take the
land now and we have to stay at the front, we shall be left
without land.” Perhaps the soldiers would all leave the front
and chaos and anarchy would result. But in answer to this we say
that this objection has nothing to do with the real issue;
whether the land is taken for payment, by agreement with the
landowners, or by a decision of the majority of the peasantry,
in either case the soldiers will remain at the front and will
certainly remain there as long as the war lasts and will not be
able to return to their villages. Why should the soldiers at the
front not be anxious about the landowners imposing unfavourable
terms in the form of a voluntary agreement, why should they be
anxious about the peasants making a majority decision against
the landowners? Why should the soldier at the front place his
trust in the landowner, in a “voluntary” agreement with the
landowner? I can understand the political parties of the
landowners and capitalists talking like this, but I do not
believe that the Russian soldier at the front sees it that
way. If there is a “voluntary” agreement with the landowner,
tile soldier will not call it good order, will not place his
trust in it, or is more likely to see in it a continuation of
the old disorder that existed under the landowners.

If
the soldier is told that the land is being taken over by the
people, that the local peasants are renting land and
paying
rent, not to the landowner but to their own committee for the
common good, for those very soldiers at the front, and not for
the landowner, he is more likely to have faith in this. If this
is a majority decision, the soldier at the front will know that
there cannot be any “voluntary” agreements with landowners, that
the landowners are also citizens with equal rights whom nobody
wishes to wrong; the land belongs to the entire nation,
consequently it belongs also to the landowner, not as a
privilege of the nobility, but in the same way as it belongs to
any other citizen. From the day the power of the tsar was
overthrown—a tsar who was the biggest landowner and
oppressor of the masses—there must be no privileges for the
landowners. With the establishment of liberty, the power of the
landowners must be considered overthrown once and for all. The
soldier at the front does not stand to lose anything from this
point of view; on the contrary, he will have much greater faith
in the state authorities, he will not worry about his household
or about his family being treated unjustly or being
neglected.

There remains one other objection that has been raised to our
proposal. This argument is that if the peasants were to seize
the landed estates immediately, such immediate, poorly prepared
seizure might lead to a deterioration in the tilling and sowing
of the land. I must say that a government of the majority, a
central state power, has not yet been established, the peasants
have not yet acquired sufficient confidence in themselves and
have not lost their trust in the landowners and capitalists; I
believe that we are drawing closer to this day by day, that the
peasantry are day by day losing their confidence in the old
state power and realising that only the peasants’, soldiers’,
workers’ and other elected deputies and nobody else can
constitute the government in Russia; I believe that every
passing day brings us closer to this, not because any political
party has advised it—millions of people will never listen
to the advice of parties if that advice does not fall in with
their own experience. We are rapidly approaching the time when
there will be no other state power in Russia except the power of
the representatives of the peasants and workers. When I am told
that the immediate seizure of the land is likely to lead to
its
being poorly cultivated, that the sowing will be poor, I must
say that our peasants cultivate the land very poorly because of
their downtrodden condition, because of centuries of oppression
by the landowners. There is, of course, a fearful crisis in
Russia, a crisis that has hit her as it has other belligerent
countries, and Russia can only weather it by better cultivation
of the land and the greatest economy of manpower. But today, at
the time of the first sowing of crops, can anything be changed
by “voluntary” agreements with the landowners? Are we to
understand that the land owners will better look after the
cultivation of the soil, that the peasants will sow worse if
they know they are sowing land which is the property of the
whole people and not of the landowner? If they pay rent into
their own peasant funds and not to the landowner? This is such
nonsense that I am astonished to hear such arguments; it is
absolutely unbelievable and is nothing but a ruse on the part of
the landowners.

The landowners realise that they can no longer rule by means of
the big stick; they realise that very well, and are adopting a
form of rule that is new to Russia but which has existed for a
long time in Western Europe, in the West-European
countries. Two revolutions in Russia have shown that the rule of
the stick is no longer possible, and in the West-European
countries dozens of revolutions have demonstrated it. Those
revolutions have taught the landowners and capitalists a lesson;
they have taught them that they have to rule the people by
deception, by flattery; that they have to adapt themselves, wear
a red badge on their jackets, and, sharks though they are,
declare: “We are revolutionary democrats, please wait a bit and
we’ll do everything for you.” The argument that the peasants will
make a worse job of the sowing now if they sow land which no
longer belongs to the landowners but is national property, is
simply making fun of the peasants, it is an attempt to maintain
rule over them by means of deception.

I repeat—there must be no landed proprietorship at all;
tenure is not proprietorship, tenure is a temporary measure and
it changes from year to year. The peasant who rents a plot of
land does not dare regard the land as his own. The land is not
his nor the landowner’s, it belongs to the people.
I repeat that this cannot make the sowing of crops this year,
this spring, any worse. That assumption is so monstrous and
improbable that there is only one thing for me to
say—beware of the landowners, do not trust them, do not be
taken in by fair words and promises. It must be remembered that
a decision made by a majority of peasants, who are careful
enough in making decisions, is a lawful decision of state
significance. In this respect the peasants are to be relied
upon. I have, for example, a decision passed by Penza peasants
which is worded throughout with extraordinary caution; the
peasants are not planning any immediate changes for the whole of
Russia, but they do not want to place them selves in intolerable
bondage, and in this they are right. The greatest bondage was
that of the peasant to the landowner, and such it remains,
bondage to the landowners and oppressors. The abolition of that
bondage, therefore, must not be put off for a single week, even
a single hour; but every seizure must be an organised seizure,
not to make property of the seized land, not to divide it up,
but to use it in common, as the property of the ’whole
people.

I could finish with this question of the seizure of land by
answering that the objections against our proposal are based on
deception when they come from the landowners and capitalists,
and on misunderstanding, on a too credulous belief in what the
landowners and capitalists say untruthfully against us when they
come from those who are neither land owners nor capitalists but
people who have the interests of the working people at heart. If
you examine our arguments you will see that the just demand that
the landed estates be abolished immediately and similarly that
property in land belong to the people cannot be put into effect
until a central government is established, but what we do
advise, and urge most insistently, is that the peasants
themselves, right on the spots in the localities, take over the
land so as to avoid any breach of good order. We offer this
advice in our resolutions, but perhaps it is superfluous, since
the peasants are doing this without our advice.

I shall pass to the second question, the one to which the
greatest attention should be drawn, the question of what we
think should be done with the land in the best interests of the
masses when it becomes the property of the whole
people,
when
private property is abolished. That time is close at hand in
Russia. In fact, the landowners’ power, if not destroyed, has
been undermined. When all the peasants are in possession of the
land, when there are no landowners, how are we to distribute the
land? It seems to me that we must have some sort of common,
basic view on this question, be cause, obviously, local
arrangements will always be made by the peasantry. It cannot be
otherwise in a democratic state; this is so obvious that there
is no need even to talk about it. But in answer to the question
of what must be done to secure the land for the working people,
we say: “We want to protect the interests of the wage-workers
and poor peasants.” Our Russian Social-Democratic Party of
Bolsheviks regards this as its duty. We ask ourselves: If we say
that the land will belong to the nation is that the same as
saying the land will belong to the working people? Our answer
is: No, it is not the same thing! By saying that the land will
belong to the nation, we mean that landed property will be
abolished; we mean that all the land will belong to the whole
people; we mean that anyone who uses land will rent it from the
nation. If such an arrangement is made no differences in land
tenure will remain, all the land will be alike, and, as the
peasants often say, “All the old bounds and barriers will fall
away, the land will be unfenced—there will be free soil,
and free labour.”

Does that mean that the land will be handed over to all working
people? No, it does not. Free labour on free soil means that all
the old forms of land tenure will be abolished and there will be
no other form of ownership than national ownership; everyone
rents land from the state; there is a single state authority,
that of all the workers and peasants; a peas ant can rent land
from it as a leaseholder; between the peasant and the state
there are no middlemen; the terms on which land is rented are
equal for all; that is free labour on free soil.

Does that mean that the land will be handed over to all the
working people? No, it does not. You cannot eat land, and to
farm it you need implements, animals, equipment, and money;
without money, without implements, you cannot farm. And so, when
you set up a system of free labour on free soil, there will be
no landed estates, no categories on
the
land.[4] There will be
only land which is national property and free tenants renting
land from the state. When you set up this system it will not
mean the transfer of the land to all the working people, it will
merely mean that every farmer will freely dispose of his land;
anybody who wants land will be free to rent it from the
state. That will be a big step forward compared with the Russia
of the tsars and landowners, It will be a big step forward
because Russia of the tsars and landowners was a country in
which 70,000,000 dessiatines were given over to 30,000 Markovs,
Romanovs and other such landowners; it will be a Russia in which
there will be free labour on free soil. This has already been
done in many places. Already now Russia is ahead of the Russia
of the tsars and landowners, but this is not a transfer of land
to the working people, it is the transfer of land to the farmer,
because if the land belongs to the state, and those people take
it who want to farm it, that is not enough; it is not enough to
want to farm, the ability to farm is also needed, and even
ability is not enough. Any farm labourer or day-labourer has
that ability, but he does not have sufficient animals,
implements, and capital, so that no matter how many decisions
are taken, no matter how much we talk about it, we shall not
establish free labour on free soil in that way. Even if we were
to hang up notices about free soil in every volost
administration, it would not improve matters as far as the
working people are concerned, any more than the prisons in
West-European republics would cease to be prisons because they
had the words “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” inscribed on
them. If the words “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” are
written on a factory, as in America, the factory does not
thereby cease to be a hell for the workers and a paradise for
the capitalists.

And so we have to think of what to do further, how to ensure
that there should not be merely free labour—that is a step
forward, but it is still not a step towards protecting the
interests of the working people; it is a step towards liberation
from the landowner sharks, from exploitation by the landowners,
liberation from the Markovs, from the police, etc., but it is
not a step towards protecting the interests of the working
people, because the poor, propertyless peasant cannot do
anything with the land without
animals,
implements, and
capital. That is why I am very sceptical about the two so-called
norms or standards of land tenure, the labour standard and the
subsistence standard. I know that arguments about these two
norms and explanations of them are always to be met with in the
Narodnik parties. I know that those parties hold the view that
these two norms, these two standards, must be
established—the labour standard is the largest amount of
land a family can till; the subsistence standard is one just
sufficient to feed the family, less would mean hunger. I have
said that I am very sceptical about this question of standards
or norms and I believe it is a bureaucrat’s plan that will not
do any good; it can’t be put into practice even if it were
decided upon here. That is the crux of the whole matter! That
plan cannot relieve the position of the hired labourers and poor
peasants to any appreciable extent, and even if you accept it,
it will remain on paper so long as capitalism dominates. That
plan does not help us find the true road for the transition from
capitalism to socialism.

When people speak of these two norms, these two standards, they
imagine that only two things exist—the land and the
citizen, as if there had never been anything else in the
world. If that were so, the plan would be a good one. But that
is not so—there exists the power of capital, the power of
money; without money there cannot be any farming on the freest
land, no matter what “standards” of it you have, because as long
as money remains wage-labour ’will remain. And this means that
the rich peasants—and there are no less than a million
families of them in Russia—are oppressing and exploiting
hired labourers, and will continue to oppress them on the “free”
soil. Those rich peasants constantly, not by way of exception
but as a general rule, resort to the hiring of workers by the
year, by the season and by the day, that is, they resort to the
exploitation of the poor peasants, the proletarians. Alongside
this you have millions and millions of peasants who have no
horses and cannot exist without selling their labour-power,
without doing seasonal work for somebody else, etc. As long as
the power of money, the power of capital, remains, no matter
what “standards” of land tenure you establish they will at best
be useless in practice because they do not take into
consideration the chief factor—that
property in Implements,
animals, and money is distributed unevenly; they do not take
into consideration the existence of the hired labour that is
exploited. That is a basic fact in the present-day life of
Russia, and there is no getting away from it; but if we
establish any kind of “standards”, life will bypass them and
they will remain on paper. To protect the interests of the
propertyless, poor peasants in this great transformation of
Russia in which you are now engaged and which you will
undoubtedly carry through, when private property in land will be
abolished and a step forward will have been made towards the
better, socialist future; to protect the interests of the
workers and poor peasants in this great work of transformation
that you are only just beginning, which will go a long way
forward and which, it may be said without exaggeration, will
undoubtedly be brought to completion in Russia because there is
no power that can stop it, we must not take the road of
establishing norms or standards, but must find some other
way.

I and my Party comrades, in whose name I have the honour to
speak, know of only two ways of protecting the interests of
agricultural labourers and poor peasants, and we recommend these
two ways to the Peasants’ Soviet for its attention.

The first way is to organise the agricultural labourers and poor
peasants. We should like, and we advise it, to have in each
peasant committee, in each volost, uyezd and gubernia, a
separate group of agricultural labourers and poor peasants who
will have to ask themselves: “If the land becomes the property
of the whole people tomorrow—and it certainly will, because
the people want it to—then where do we come in? Where shall
we, who have no animals or implements, got them from? How are we
to farm the land? How must we protect our interests? How are we
to make sure that the land, which will belong to the whole
people, which will really be the property of the nation, should
not fall only into the hands of proprietors?
If it falls into the hands of those who own enough animals and
implements, shall we gain anything by it? Is that what we made
this great revolution for? Is that what we wanted?”

The “people” will have the land, but that is not enough
to protect the interests of agricultural labourers. It is not
a
matter of us here, from above, or the peasant committee,
establishing a “standard” of land to be held by
individuals. Such measures will not help as long as capital is
dominant, and they will not offer deliverance from the
domination of capitalism. There is only one way to escape the
yoke of capitalism and ensure that the people’s land goes to the
working people, and that is by organising the
agricultural labourers, who will be guided by their experience,
their observations and their distrust of what the village sharks
tell them, even though these sharks wear red rosettes in their
buttonholes and call themselves “revolutionary democrats”.

The poor peasants can only be taught by independent organisation
in the localities, they can only learn from their own
experience. That experience will not be easy, we cannot and do
not promise them a land flowing with milk and honey. The
landowners will be thrown out because the people wish it, but
capitalism will remain. It is much more difficult to do
away with capitalism, and the road to its overthrow is a
different one. It is the road of independent, separate
organisation of the agricultural labourers and the poor
peasants. And that is what our Party proposes in the first
instance.

Only this road promises a gradual, difficult, but real and
certain transfer of the land to the working people.

The second stop which our Party recommends is that every big
economy, for example, every big landed estate, of which there
are 30,000 in Russia, should be organised as soon as possible
into a model farm for the common cultivation of the
land jointly by agricultural labourers and scientifically
trained agronomists, using the animals, implements, etc., of the
landowner for that purpose. ’Without this common
cultivation under the direction of the Soviets of Agricultural
Labourers the land will not go entirely to the working
people. To be sure, joint cultivation is a difficult
business and it would be madness of course for anybody to
imagine that joint cultivation of the land can be decreed from
above and imposed on people, because the centuries-old habit of
farming on one s own cannot suddenly disappear, and because
money will be needed for it and adaptation to the new mode of
life. If this advice, this view, on the common cultivation
of
the land with commonly owned animals and implements to be used
to the best purpose jointly with agronomists—if this advice
were the invention of individual political parties, the case
would be a bad one, because changes are not made in the life of
a people on the advice of a party, because tens of millions of
people do not make a revolution on the advice of a party, and
such a change would be much more of a revolution than the
overthrow of the weak-minded Nicholas Romanov. I repeat, tens of
millions of people will not make a revolution to order, but will
do so when driven to it by dire need, when their position is an
impossible one, when the joint pressure and determination of
tens of millions of people break down the old barriers and are
actually capable of creating a new way of life. When we advise
such a measure, and advise caution in the handling of it, saying
that it is becoming necessary, we are not drawing that
conclusion from our programme, from our socialist doctrine
alone, but because we, as socialists, have come to this
conclusion by studying the life of the West-European nations. We
know that there have been many revolutions over there and that
they have established democratic republics; we know that in
America in 1865 the slave-owners were defeated and hundreds of
millions of dessiatines of land were distributed among the
peasantry for nothing or next to nothing, and nevertheless
capitalism dominates there more than anywhere else and oppresses
the mass of the working people as badly as, if not worse than,
in other countries. This is the socialist teaching, this is our
study of other nations that firmly convinces us that without the
common cultivation of the land by agricultural labourers using
the best machinery and guided by scientifically trained
agronomists there is no escape from the yoke of capitalism. But
if we were to be guided only by the experience of the
West-European countries it would be very bad for Russia, because
the Russian people in the mass are only capable of taking a
serious step along that new path when the direst need
arises. And we say to you: the time has now come when that dire
need for the entire Russian people is knocking at the door. The
dire need I speak of is precisely this—we cannot continue
farming in the old way. If we continue as before on our small
isolated farms, albeit as free citizens on free soil, we are
still faced with imminent
ruin, for the debacle is drawing
nearer day by day, hour by hour. Everyone is talking about it;
it is a grim fact, due not to the malice of individuals but to
the world war of conquest, to capitalism.

The war has exterminated millions of people, has drenched the
world in blood, brought it to the brink of disaster. This is no
exaggeration, nobody can vouch for what will happen tomorrow;
everyone is talking about it. Take the newspaper
Izvestia of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’
Deputies—everybody there is saying that the capitalists are
resorting to slow-down tactics and lockouts. That means there is
no work and the capitalists are laying off large numbers of
workers. That is what this criminal war has brought all
countries to, and not Russia alone.

That is why we say that farming on individual plots, even if it
is “free labour on free soil”, is no way out of the dreadful
crisis, it offers no deliverance from the general ruin. A
universal labour service is necessary, the greatest
economy of manpower is necessary, an exceptionally strong and
firm authority is necessary, an authority capable of effecting
that universal labour service; it cannot be done by officials,
it can be done only by the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and
Peasants’ Deputies, because they are the people, they are the
masses, because they are not a government of officials, because
they, knowing the life of the peasant from top to bottom, can
organise labour conscription, can organise that protection of
human labour that would not permit the squandering of the
peasant’s labour, and the transition to common cultivation
would, under these circumstances, be carried out gradually and
with circumspection. It is a difficult business, but ii; is
necessary to go over to common cultivation on big model farms;
if that is not done it will be impossible for Russia to find a
way out of the debacle, out of the truly desperate situation in
which she finds herself, and it would be the greatest mistake to
think that such a gigantic transformation in the life of the
people can be made at a single stroke. That cannot be done, it
requires the greatest labour effort, it requires concentration,
determination and energy on the part of each peasant and worker
at his own place, at his own particular job, which he knows and
has been working at for years. It is not a thing that can
be
done by any sort of decree, but it is a thing that must be done,
because this war of conquest has brought all mankind to the
brink of destruction; tens of millions of lives have been lost,
and still more will be lost in this terrible war unless we
strain our efforts, unless all organisations of the Soviets of
Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies take joint and determined action
towards the common cultivation of the soil without the
capitalists and without the landowners. That path is the only
one that will lead to the real transfer of the land to the
working people.

Published May 25, 1917 in Izvestia of the All-Russia Soviet of Peasants Deputies No. 14; and in the December 1917 in the pamphlet Material on the Agrarian Question, Priboi Publishers

Published according to the text of the pamphlet verified with the newspaper text

Each of these categories, in turn, was split up into different
levels and special groups, based on race, heritage, forms of
holdings and tenure, legal and agrarian status, etc. The Peasant
Reform of 1861, carried out by the tsarist government, kept this
diversity of social-status intact right up to the October
Revolution of 1917.